


Galen's daughter

by sshysmm



Category: Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel - James Luceno, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Character Study, Child Soldiers, Freeform, Jyn's other identities, Minor Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso, POV Jyn Erso, for the most part anyway, multiple oneshots, oneshots, some stormtrooper brutality, song lyrics as prompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2017-01-23
Packaged: 2018-09-18 15:55:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 13,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9392363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sshysmm/pseuds/sshysmm
Summary: An exploration of Jyn Erso: "If they adorn themselves with crystals / to make themselves look sharp / Sleep with their hand on a pistol / they're afraid of the dark..."22 freeform oneshots based around the lyrics to the song 'Gurdjieff's Daughter' by Laura Marling. I am bad at plot so thought I'd indulge myself with a bit of pretentious character study :D Making heavy use of her Wookieepedia page, being selective with the info given in Catalyst, and re-writing some scenes from the movie/Freed novel.





	1. Kestrel and the kyber

**Author's Note:**

> Each chapter is only about 5–600 words...except when I get a bit carried away. All should be under 700 words though except the last one.

**1) Kestrel and the kyber:** _If they adorn themselves with crystals / to make them look sharp_

“Hey, what’s that at your neck, pretty lady?”

Kestrel Dawn’s first day in the world was evidently going to be as difficult as Jyn Erso’s last day in the world had been.

“I know someone who’ll pay a pretty price for that.”

She’d wanted to catch eyes, but not like this. With nothing but a knife and a loaded blaster concealed at her side, she’d stalked the streets of this dusty hellhole for half a week, slowly, _carefully_ accruing enough credits from the willing pockets and pouches of oblivious locals to buy a new identity. Well, the beginnings of one.

Kestrel wasn’t like Jyn Erso; Kestrel wore clothes that weren’t the hand-me-downs of short-lived generations of insurrectionists. Kestrel’s clothes had never been worn by the dead (only by those who suddenly couldn’t place that _one garment_ they swore was in that chest…). Kestrel wore black, and it stayed black because she never had to hide in a cave, or duck behind a rock, or throw herself to the tundra to avoid blaster fire. Kestrel Dawn went to the cantina and chose what to drink for herself, but she was going to make someone else damn well pay for it — whether they knew it at the time or not.

She did not go to the cantina to sell the one possession that she had plucked from a corpse: the kyber crystal necklace that Lyra Erso had given to her daughter a lifetime ago on Lah’mu.

“It’s not for sale.”

“Oh now, in this city — _everything_ is for sale.”

Kestrel wasn’t sure she was as good at hiding her fear as Jyn Erso had been; Jyn had always had a clutch of bigger, taller, better armed rebels at her back. Jyn had known that, as a soldier in Saw Gerrera’s unit, she didn’t need to be scared of anything at all.

(Except failing Saw).

Kestrel had no unit of rebels; no comm in her pocket or backup to nod at. Kestrel had a knife and a loaded blaster, and if she could rely on the shaking in her hand to stop, she’d have no problem using them. She downed the last of her drink — Corellian brandy had seemed like a sophisticated choice, but it was vile and it felt like it burned its way from her mouth up to the back of her nose. But if she didn’t show how much she hated the drink, then she knew she could stop herself from giving away how much this creep’s attention was unnerving her.

When one of his hands reached for the gem at her neck, and the other went for her knee, Kestrel did not hesitate in revealing the knife she’d been hiding.

The would-be merchant’s eyes widened, but no one else in the cantina spared them a glance.

She leaned the point of the blade into the v of skin that wobbled at the bottom of his scraggly neck and used her spare hand to delve into a pocket — revulsion was another thing that Kestrel now knew she could be capable of hiding. She withdrew a coin and flicked it at the bartender as she retreated from the bar, eyes and knife fixed on what she was sure had been a lone opportunist.

Kestrel Dawn fled back into the shadows of the city to spend a little more time working out who she was. She never revealed the crystal at her neck again.


	2. Jyn and Saw I

**2) Jyn and Saw I:** _Sleep with their hand on a pistol / they’re afraid of the dark_

She sits as far from him as she can in the cramped cockpit, eying every inch of him with suspicion.

She’s sure she’s been so subtle; he’s not been looking at her at all. He’s not noticed the contemptuous pout on her face. But then he speaks, and it’s a sound like the rumble of the waves on the rocky beaches of Lah’mu.

“Does my blaster frighten you, Jyn?”

She presses her lips together and tightens her grip on her backpack. Her father _hated_ weapons. They’d had a blaster, but her mother had looked after it. She’d always said something about “just in case, Galen” and her father had sighed and said “it won’t come to that” and they hadn’t known that Jyn had been watching.

She doesn’t like being caught out by this huge, strange man. And she doesn’t like his blaster. Her father had been right and she’d seen it all. The blaster hadn’t helped her mother.

She glares at him and shakes her head firmly.

He turns to face her, and she thinks his face is funny; scarred, a little lopsided. Like he’s melted a bit. But a grin spreads across his mouth, and it’s a friendly one.

“That’s good. You should learn that you’ll be more scared without a blaster around than with one.”

Her frown deepens and he opens his mouth in a wide laugh. “Not of me! Not if you do as I tell you, young Jyn. But you’ve already learnt rather late that the galaxy is a cruel place, with no sympathy for any of us. I will teach you that you mustn’t show it any sympathy back.”

~*~

Jyn wakes up on the hard ground of the ruin the rebels have commandeered. She knows she shouldn’t be awake: it’s dark and it’s not her shift and if she’s sleepy tomorrow she might make a mistake, and if she makes a mistake then Saw will be disappointed in her.

But the dark is so deep in the back of this bunker that she almost can’t breathe; she can’t see anything, can’t imagine there’s air in the room, thinks for a second she might be in the cold, dark vacuum of space, or — at the bottom of a tunnel her parents prepared for her, waiting with a sputtering light for one of them to return for her.

She gulps the air that manifestly does fill the room, curling her small body tighter. Something hard and cool bumps her knees as she raises them and she seeks it out with her hands.

It’s her new blaster. Hers: her very own. Saw had seen her eyeing the clone trooper’s body hungrily (Saw sees everything), had given an almost imperceptible nod, and she had leapt forward and claimed the weapon. It’s nearly as long as her spindly arm, and it’s heavy, with a bit too much recoil for comfort when she fires it. But it’s hers. No more sharing, or waiting for the communal weapons to be doled out before a strike.

Jyn grips the icy black metal, huddles around it in the night. It’s not a sputtering lamp, but she knows how to make it work: how to clean it and charge it like she couldn’t do with the lamp. It’s better than the lamp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know Catalyst makes Saw their ride to Lah'mu, but I'd already written this before I finished Catalyst. And I liked it too much to change it. *shrug*


	3. A cave on Lah'mu

**3) A cave on Lah’mu:** _Well if it wakes you / which it has been known to_

_Don’t be alarmed / darkness can’t do you harm_

The bottom of the tunnel is damp and it’s cold, and getting colder by the minute. She’d been playing down by the shore, and then she’d run straight to her parents when the ship had come. Then … after something else had happened … she’d gone to the place she was meant to, through long, mist-beaded foliage, stumbling up through the soft, loamy earth of Lah’mu and into the cave.

The rocks at the bottom of the tunnel weren’t comfortable, and she’d dropped Stormy somewhere outside. She hoped he’d be ok without her.

She’d waited as long as she could before she put the lamp on, and even then it was still flickering in her trembling hands.

Jyn had a short temper, and she shook the lamp vigorously, partly so that she didn’t have to look at her own shivering fingers. It didn’t help: the lamp wavered and went out.

She shrieked with rage and stood up, punting the useless thing across the safe room with her boot.

“Come on, Saw! Where _are_ you?” her throat felt raw as she threw her head back and howled at the hatch he was meant to appear from.

She was now in total darkness. Once upon a time it had made her pulse quicken with terror and she’d had to clamp down on quivering lips to stop herself from crying out. Now, Jyn embraced it. She liked the darkness; it was more peaceful than the lamp’s incessant, flickering _unreliability_.

But the silence stretched, and that was something she didn’t like.

From somewhere outside she finally discerned a noise, something that sounded like distant thunder, but was building to a low rumble. As it grew, pebbles began to clatter down the sides of the safe room; the metal hatch at the top rattled on its hinge: an urgent, staccato message.

Jyn continued to look up, but she didn’t try to climb out. The rumble had become a roiling growl; it seemed to come from the rocks all around her as it grew to an intolerable level.

The cave was starting to collapse.

Eventually, she had to take her eyes from the wildly clattering hatch when a puff of red dust was whipped into the room.

She was coughing as gusts of it continued to force their way into her hiding place, too angry about Saw not turning up to wonder why there was red dust on Lah’mu.

But someone was there. She couldn’t see who through the dust and the dark, but there were hands on her shoulders. For some reason, they made her angrier — why wouldn’t he just leave her in peace?

She didn’t know how she knew it was a he, but she was coughing too hard to fight off the grip as she was tugged away from the cascade of dust below the hatch.

“Jyn! We’re approaching Eadu!”

She snapped her eyes open, gasped so hard that it made her retch, and took a swing at whoever _wouldn’t leave her alone_.

The figure leaned back out of reach easily, and she blinked the dust and darkness from her eyes, trying to register her surroundings.

A spaceship. Durasteel decking all around her. Dusty faces watching her. There was a sadness in the cabin, but they were looking at _her_ expectantly. With worry.

She hugged her elbows, and clamped down on chattering teeth. Now she knew why Saw hadn’t come that time. Saw was on Jedha, and the red sand of Jedha was making her lungs ache, and the red sand of Jedha had buried Saw, swallowing him alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like writing dreams. A bit too much.


	4. Jyn and Saw II

**4) Jyn and Saw II:** _Fear will hurt you / and outside, if wind is beating_

_a tree to a bed / don’t fear that it might be meeting_

_some untimely end_

It was all going to shit like never before. That was all she could know from Saw’s look as he pressed the weapons into her grip. They came with his fatherly squeeze on the back of her hands: comforting weight in her palms and comforting touch from Saw.

(Probably, that should have been a warning).

“You know what to do, Jyn. I know I can rely on you.”

“Always,” she nodded fiercely, always, _always_ needing to show him that she was capable, she was brave, she could do this.

“We’ll bring the transport round as soon as we can!” he called. The space opened between them as he went, his lumbering gait carrying him towards the door of their compromised base. Jyn herself was already sprinting in the opposite direction, mentally running through the traps she needed to arm, the order in which to do so that would leave her enough time to get to the exit.

One by one she flicked switches that they’d hoped never to have to arm with steady, grease-stained fingers. She clicked timers into place; drew taught wires across doorways and hatches. No one would be able to get a scrap of information about what the outfit had been planning here if even a single one of these was triggered. And, as Saw liked to be thorough, once one was triggered, the whole lot would follow.

Her blood raced with adrenaline and pride in knowing that she’d done everything quicker than anyone else in the team could have. A smirk of satisfaction on her lips, Jyn pushed into a solid race for the exit; she’d be at the rendezvous point waiting for them, and Saw would know that she’d done the job perfectly, and no one would need to wait for her or worry about her holding them up.

She flicked her scarf up around her face and slowed to a saunter as she approached the tall ridge where their vessel could dip down briefly to pick up passengers and cargo.

Sitting down on a boulder, she hummed to herself for a bit, twirling the knife Saw had given her between her fingers.

Her eyes narrowed as she scanned the sky over the nearby city. Its streets were never quiet, but they were starting to sound downright _riotous_. From her vantage point up on the ridge, she could make out the sounds of blaster fire and shouting; the odd, deep _whump_ of grenades, and the crackle of a fire that was beginning to spread. She swore she could even hear Saw’s phenomenal growl over it all.

Her heart thumped in her chest and she stood, prowling back and forth as she watched the city, fingers twitching helplessly. She should be down there. Why hadn’t anyone called her comm? She could have been there by now, even after arming the base. She’d been on missions where she’d had to leave the bodies of her comrades behind, but this was different; at least then she’d had a decent chance to fight beside them, to try and stop them from dying in the first place.

Just as she’d resolved to make her way down there, the tension in her shoulders melted with relief at the sound of their transport engines whining to life.

Knowing that it would never leave without Saw on board — they’d all have given their lives in vengeance if anything had happened to him — she prepared all the smart admonishments she’d have for him, leaving her out of the fun down in the city.

But the smile that was hidden behind her wind-tousled scarf dropped from her lips as she saw the craft swerve up and away from the city. It didn’t even wobble in her direction, just pointed its blue jets to her and shot away up into the atmosphere.

She’d been afraid for her comrades down in the city, but a new, icy horror descended on her. She glanced to the hidden location of the base. Had she done something wrong?

As she tried to suppress the creeping cold of the shock overtaking her body, Jyn flinched from the sound of the old base going sky high. Her mind numb, hands crammed in her pockets, she made herself move in the direction of the city.


	5. Captain Andor's first impressions (Jedha City)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassian POV. *'Trash' by Suede plays in the background*

**5) Captain Andor’s first impressions (Jedha City):** _They do what they’re supposed / to but they have been known_

_to stand strong and tall / weather it all_

It was to be expected that that would happen. He’d exchanged a look with Draven at the shaky footage captured by Kaytoo’s cam and they’d silently agreed that this was a terrible idea.

Like a wild animal emerging from containment she’d snarled from the transport, fire in her eyes and a stolen shovel in hand. The face of a woman who wouldn’t hesitate to knock you into the dirt and steal your ship. The face of a woman who’d seen a way out of a death sentence that didn’t require her to put a mote of trust in anyone but herself.

Stalking through the streets of Jedha City, he tries to keep a wary grip on her, half-expecting her to flee, or to feel the subtle persuasion of his own blaster in his side. But he’s starting to sense that she’s more than Draven thinks she is.

Although — it’s to be expected that she’d round on the growl of challenge from the man she’d shouldered. He tugs her onwards, ignoring the threats in Basic and Aqualish that follow them. Maybe he’ll test his theory, leave her in the crowd for a second and see whether she tries to disappear. He’s confident he can track her; she’s still a little dazed by the crowds after her stint on Wobani.

She stands near where she’s been left, pouting, oddly childlike as she scans her surroundings.

It only takes a moment before she’s — not fleeing, not idly filling her pockets with things from the market stalls, but _chatting_ with a man who’s clearly out to con her, one of the chanting idiots from the Temple.

That wasn’t what he’d expected at all.

He returns and drags her onwards, and they both see the increased tension in the open space before them. The square is soon occupied by a tank ridden by grimy stormtroopers, and she obligingly turns away along with him.

But then all hell breaks loose.

There’s shrapnel flying and plumes of sand jetting into the air, the zapping of blaster fire and grenades bouncing in all too many directions and she’s — not by his side. Has she done what might have been expected, and used the opportunity to slip away?

Someone’s screaming, but he’s not sure if he can actually hear it over the rest of the noise, or if he just recognises that it must be the child in the middle of the carnage, her feet glued to the spot, mouth wide and eyes clenched.

And there’s Jyn Erso, coiled as tight as she’d been when she sprung from the back of a labour transport on Wobani, darting through the smoke and ozone and glowing shots of two ruthless sets of combatants. She scoops the child up and scuttles to the edge of the square, less encumbered than if she’d held a blaster rifle in her arms.

She hands the child to a wailing woman, then turns, darts from cover to cover, returning to him. He blasts one of the rebels who’s about to inadvertently take her out along with the tank she’s crouched in the lee of, and she springs at him, spinning him and shoving him to the ground as shrapnel bursts above their heads.

His ears are ringing as they both haul themselves up and keep moving, and he spares her a glance. There’s blood around her ears and nose; dust and grime on everything; her hair straggles free of its tie. But there’s fire in her eyes, and he knows that she’s more than Draven thinks she is. More than he thought she was.


	6. Tanith Ponta

**6) Tanith Ponta:** _Take what you can_

“Tanith! Tanith quick, there are troopers coming!”

Her fingers don’t shake as she plucks handfuls of grenades from the crate, and she ignores the shredded packing that’s spilling everywhere. No need to worry about covering their tracks now.

“Tanith!”

She shoots a glare across the warehouse at her companion’s whine. The satchel can take at least a few more clutches, and she can take whatever comes through those doors.

“Calm down, Keryn, who’s got the kriffing bag full of explosives here?” The metal of the grenades makes them chitter together as she piles them in. Mentally calculating how long the bagful might last, she gently shakes the satchel to settle them as though they were newly laid ash angel eggs.

Keryn’s eyes widen as she looks at the bulging canvas of Tanith’s bag. She’s better at the tech stuff than Tanith, and good with her hands in whatever way you need. But she sucks at field work; that’s why Tanith always keeps her close.

She flashes a grin at the younger woman’s worried face, closes the gap between them and gives her arm a squeeze. Keryn’s olive skin flushes, but she tries to look reassured, even as the sound of boots (actually quite a _lot_ of boots) and the click of helmet comms come closer.

“Come on, I’ve got an idea,” Tanith pulls Keryn after her, grabbing another grenade from the open box as they retreat from the warehouse door.

They huddle in a dark corner of the building, and Tanith scans the crates on the wall opposite. Recalculating, she moves behind the blast-shielded boxes on their side of the warehouse and hefts the explosive in her hand.

“Oh, Tanith, no—“

Keryn’s words are drowned out by a trooper with a loudspeaker: “Come out of the warehouse with your hands visible. We are authorised to use force, and we will do so if you do not comply.”

Tanith peers towards the door, waits for it to open fully, waits for the silhouetted forms of the troopers on point to creep into the room, then grasps something she keeps at her neck, something hard under her scarf that fits perfectly in her fist. She grins again at Keryn, straightens her arm, and lobs the armed grenade at the far wall.

There’s the expected blast, and then an uncountable succession of them. Tanith and Keryn cower behind the blast-proofed containers, Tanith taking care to keep the bag of grenades well sheltered from any falling debris. When the ringing in her ears is the only thing she can hear, she pulls herself to a crouch and finds Keryn’s hand.

They dart through the smoke and rubble and out into the barely daylight of a grimy alley. One or two dumbfounded faces peer at them from the ends of the street, but the locals aren’t interested if the stormtroopers aren’t there to tell them to be interested.

Tanith and Keryn reach the main street just as the rest of their party pulls up in a speeder. Keryn leaps in like a scorched ash-rabbit, but Tanith stops to gently hand the bag of grenades across before climbing in herself.

Any remaining troopers haven’t even made it to the hole she blasted in the warehouse yet. Tanith touches the hard crystal under her scarf again. It’s been a good day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Could it be...bi Jyn strikes again? :O


	7. Scarif I

**7) Scarif I:** _Never give orders / just to be obeyed_

“On and on. Until we win, or the chances are spent.”

She’s surprised to find that the simplicity of the words reassures her; hopefully it reassures the rest of the crowded shuttle. They’re all still there, anyway. There had been no murmur of regret on their journey; no one had tapped her on the shoulder and asked for clarification, exemption, or to return to Yavin 4. There had been no mutiny.

She promises them that somehow, someway, she and Cassian and Kaytoo will find the plans. And now there’s nothing more she can say, nothing more to promise the poised volunteers whose eyes are on her.

She’s still uneasy about their reasons for being there, but it’s largely down to the galling realisation that her own motivation is not all that different.

She positively chafes with the idea that any of them are there for her because they think she offers salvation, or absolution from whatever sins they’ve committed in the name of the Rebellion. But she thinks uneasily of the years she’d spent trying to be someone other than the rebel that Saw had made her in to, and his final words — “Save the Rebellion! Save the dream!” — echo in her ears.

If she’s not there for her own salvation, she’s there for her father’s. And if she can prove that he’d always planned the destruction of the weapon he was forced to work on, then maybe, after the weapon has gone, she can think about who she is. Someone who exists beyond the parameters imposed on the child of a notorious parent; someone who no longer means anything as a bargaining chip for empires, rebellions, or anyone else.

She tries to imagine being that person, and thinks it must be liberating. She presses her lips into what she hopes is an encouraging smirk, and the troops before her nod sagely.

Baze and Chirrut stand at the front, and Chirrut’s grin makes him stand out as much as the humming of her kyber necklace must make her light up in his mind. She can almost see his pride, his _vitality_ reflecting, sparkling on Baze, who leans comfortably on the leg closest to Chirrut, his eyelids hooded and a soft, content smile on his own features.

Jyn feels a curious urge, looking at the two of them, to step forward and embrace them both at once.

And Cassian steps up close to her, addresses the ground teams, tells them to make “ten men feel like a hundred,” and something like pride swells in her chest, and she thinks they might just do this. They might just have the conviction to pull this off.

She glances up at him, not for reassurance exactly, but that’s what she gets from his smile nonetheless.

She can hardly remember a time when she’s been in a room full of so many people, about to do such a stupid, reckless thing, and seen so many smiles, and felt so much _purpose_. She knows suddenly, that she’s truly home.


	8. Scarif II

**8) Scarif II:** _Never consider yourself or others / without knowing that you’ll change_

The lines of his face have become softer over the last days. Maybe hers have, too.

She’s remembered how to let a smile touch her eyes and she feels it play on her face as she looks up at him with wonder.

The world is coming to pieces around them; it’s smoke and death and the noise of everything falling apart, and he’s barely holding on to it with her, but for now they’re both there.

No one else is, and her heart aches. So many people who’d found their final chances already, who’d died in ways she’d never know about: committing small acts of heroism for each other, or just being too slow, or in the wrong place when flaming debris was launched in their direction.

She thinks of Kay and Bodhi, and of Chirrut and Baze. She thinks she should feel guilty about the fact that she didn’t really know any of the others well enough to imagine more than blaster fire and explosions in their final moments.

There’s a horrible orange, oily fire over where the landing pad was, where Bodhi and their transport were. He’d been so scared, scared of his own shadow, of what lay behind his eyelids, and he was barely coming to understand the decision he’d made in leaving the Empire. She hopes he managed to find some peace before the end.

She knows that Chirrut will have found strength from the Force, but she’s seen the fear that made his face tight in leaving Jedha to its destruction. He’s as vulnerable as the rest of them behind his crackling humour, and no one came to Scarif to die; though they all knew that it was likely. She hates to think of his graceful movement coming to an end in a vulgar display of blaster fire.

If Chirrut died before Baze, she knows a few extra stormtroopers will have felt the firepower of Baze’s cannon. There’s not much that Baze gave away in the short time she knew him, but his stoic loyalty to Chirrut ran deeper than the oceans of Mon Cala, and she knows he will have kept firing until the last.

She knows what happened to Kay, too. She’d heard the power drain from his voice over the comm; she’d seen the icy horror in Cassian’s eyes. His closest friend, the only constant he knew, and he couldn’t go to his side, could only listen to the options closing in around them: _climb. Climb_.

Now she holds Cassian tight, tries to soothe the pain shivering through his body. She feels like she’s only just noticed how beautiful his smile is.

His eyes are gentle now, and she can’t even see a trace of the deep frown line he’s turned on her so often in the last few days. She doesn’t need to wonder whether he regrets any of this: he’s looking at her like he’d follow her to the end of the universe, and for the first time ever, that ever anyone has looked at Jyn like that, she doesn’t flinch.

She basks in it.


	9. Lyra Erso

**9) Lyra Erso:** _It may not surprise you / but pride has been known to_

_rise up a storm_

She’s convinced herself that she’d not understood at the time. But deep down, she knows that if she’d met eight-year-old Jyn and told her that, then eight-year-old Jyn would have kicked her older counterpart in the shin as hard as she could and she’d have rightly called her a liar.

Her mother had fallen far too suddenly. And she knew what blaster fire was, even if she’d not seen it for a couple of years. And she knew, suddenly, what a soul-destroying grief looked like on her father’s face.

For a little while, she’d been at war with herself over what had happened. She loved her parents and she trusted them; she couldn’t bring herself to imagine that her mother might have done something _wrong_ , something reckless and half-chanced and something that had left Jyn with no one to look after her except a band of rebel guerrillas.

But it didn’t take long for Saw’s methods to toughen up an already angry child, and she’d begun to think that her mother had made a stupid choice; a selfish choice. She’d never have said so out loud; the only time she’d tried to suggest such a thing, Saw’s face had fallen, his eyes taking on a glassy, wild look that she cowered from. “Lyra was a _hero_ ,” his voice had quavered. “She _loathed_ the Empire. She had no doubts about the only way to deal with them.”

So Jyn carried on fighting for the Rebellion, but the seeds of something had been planted, and they grew freely when Saw abandoned her. For a time, she wallowed: everything in the galaxy was the fault of Lyra Erso and her idiotic self-sacrifice. But she never once thought about selling, or even taking off, the kyber necklace that she still wore.

Her mother’s voice was a whisper in her ear that she’d never escape. “Jyn. Trust the Force.”

She told herself that she didn’t even know what that meant, tried to dismiss the words as those of a zealot.

All the defences she had made up for her mother as a child were now locked away in the crystal at her neck. She couldn’t access them, but they were there, an ever-present denial of the bitter crust that her memories of Lyra had formed.

Once, briefly, she had tried on her mother’s name. She’d told herself that it was because she wanted to have the kind of single-minded focus that would let her stand alone on a beach and shoot an Imperial officer without any regard to her safety. But the reasons were at once far simpler, and far more complex than that.

Lyra Rallik had not lasted long in the galaxy. She didn’t really have the conviction to be herself, and the girl who wore that identity never quite shook the feeling that she was a naughty child, about to be caught playing dress-up in clothes that weren’t hers.

But oh, the holovid from her father. And his cold, frail body in her arms on Eadu. Life returned to her memories of her mother, and she remembered how fiercely Lyra had always regarded that man in the white cape. Her mother had known long before the beach on Lah’mu that the man in white was the one who would destroy Jyn’s life, not Lyra herself.

Jyn didn’t know how much she looked like her mother, but Orson Krennic did, and he shuddered at the likeness facing him on top of the Citadel.


	10. The man in white (Eadu)

**10) The man in white (Eadu):** _Countless lives lost / at the hands of pride and I’ll fall_

Her eyes locked with those of the man in white. His cape cracked and snapped in the raging winds of Eadu, glowing like moonlight against the dark. There was a question on his lips, but the rain that poured down and blurred his features kept it from escaping.

There was no question on Jyn’s face. Though she did have an answer for him, if she could just reach that blaster with her cold-numbed fingers.

His troopers hauled him to his shuttle before she could respond.

And just like that, she was crouching alone and scared in the grass that had been their home field, but had abruptly become the site of her mother’s execution. The man in white’s cape had thrashed in the same way when his body had curved backwards, following her mother’s shot. But Lyra had missed, and Jyn’s father had gone quietly with the man in white. And for years, _years_ that Jyn had tried to tamp down on her memories of him, unable to understand his connection with the man in white, the man in white had made her father into an architect of destruction. Made him into the man whose mind held the power to turn Jedha inside out, to put plasma where the earth had been and to put the ground into the sky.

Jyn’s roar was knocked right back into her lungs by the shuttle’s thrusters. She closed her eyes against the sudden onrush of hot air and steam, arms reaching out automatically for whatever purchase she could get.

But behind her eyelids all she could see was the light smirk that the man in white always seemed to wear. The pitying look he’d given her father, then her mother. The smooth, proud voice that never spoke words she could discern, but that left her father looking as downtrodden as if he’d been physically beaten.

She was sliding inevitably backwards, like dirt kicked up by the shuttle as it took off, and her aching fingers scrabbled on the charred, wet metal of the platform.

As she slid she imagined how tightly she’d held onto a little girl caught in the crossfire on Jedha. She remembered the strength with which the girl’s mother had taken her back, remembered all the faces of all the pilgrims and traders, and how she’d drunk in the sensations of being amongst a crowd. The crowds on Imperial prisons were washed clean of narratives; bleached by the work and the proximity of death. But the crowds on Jedha had been a feast of stories, of life intermingled, of the Force itself jostling and rolling around the streets.

And the man in white had made her father’s mind take them all away. All those stories, and all that confusing, unknowable _life_ , and that smirking little prig of a man had made her father wipe it all away, and he’d been proud of Galen for doing so.

It felt like an eternity, but finally Jyn’s fingers found the edge of the platform, and her cracking nails stabbed with pain as she dug in. Her shoulders wrenched, and her mouth gaped with the effort of holding herself there. The rain of Eadu tasted of ozone and oil and burning flesh, and it splashed her lips and made her splutter as she pulled herself up.

She knew exactly which crumpled body belonged to her father, and she crawled desperately to it, needing to make sure that the man in white hadn’t really changed him — make sure that he was still just her Papa — and not the monster that the galaxy would imagine when confronted with his creation.


	11. A farm on Lah'mu

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lyra Erso POV.

**11) A farm on Lah’mu:** _Who’ll weep for them? Sometimes I do._

_I do sometimes_

_Who weeps for them? Sometimes I do._

_I do sometimes_

She’s naturally a merry child, untroubled when allowed to get up to her own devices. But sometimes she wants things that seem so simple to her, and yet make her parents sad and unyielding.

“ _Why not_?” Jyn’s small fists bunch at her sides and she stamps a foot. The perfect image of petulance would be funny were she demanding anything else. “It was fun there! Everyone played with me, and Has gave me Bantha-rides, and I had those _cool_ googles!”

“We cannot go back to Alpinn, Jyn,” her mother sighs. It’s not the first time that Jyn’s made this request, and Lyra senses that it’s becoming something that she asks when she becomes troubled about a memory, or has a question about their life on Lah’mu that she doesn’t know how to ask. But maybe that’s just Lyra projecting her own memories and questions onto their child.

“Besides, you still have your cool googles,” Galen coaxes gently, moving stiffly in the cramped space to the cot where some of Jyn’s toys are lying. He proffers them with an attempt at a smile and scans the other toys; Lucky Hazz Obloobitt had not been able to join them in their impromptu dash from Coruscant.

Jyn scowls. “It’s not the same, Papa,” she says it with an eyeroll, as though the galaxy’s foremost scientific mind could not possibly comprehend this simple fact.

“There’s no one to play with here…” now her bottom lip starts to wobble, and Lyra keeps her face turned towards the food she’s preparing so that Jyn cannot see the tears in her own eyes.

“Sure there is, Stardust,” Galen continues gamely, picking up Stormy from the couch and approaching her. “And if it’s Bantha-rides you want, then Bantha-rides you’ll get!”

He puts Stormy in her hands then crouches, facing away from her and encouraging her to climb up on his back.

Lyra’s smiling now, but she lets her hair fall around her face so that the water trickling down her cheeks is hidden. Jyn’s getting too big to be carried like this, and Galen’s back is getting to creaky for it. But it still helps diffuse the situation. She finds enough calm in her voice to call after their forms as they head outside: “don’t go far, I’ll call when food’s ready!”

She wonders how many others Jyn remembers; Galen’s old professor, who had disappeared along with the Imperial research centre she’d been working on; Lyra’s dear Nari (not even Nari can know where they’ve gone); the gentle, graceful Lokori; or the fiercely loyal handmaids on Vallt; all of whom had taken Jyn as one of their own without question or hesitation. Does her daughter remember the blood of the Lokori spattering the streets they’d called home?

Lyra wipes the tears on her face away angrily. They’re safe, and that’s what’s paramount. Not Lyra’s dreams of exploring the galaxy, not Galen’s all-encompassing _need_ for research, not all the good his mind could be doing out there if he were just allowed to be the renewables expert he’d wanted to be. They’re there for Jyn; until the galaxy is safe for Jyn; until Orson Krennic forgets the name of Erso; or the galaxy forgets the name of Orson Krennic.

They can honour the memories of kind strangers, of friends they’ll never see again, of the scorched remains of Grange and Vallt and Lokori and Samovar and Wadi Raffa and Malpaz and Hypori, but they cannot risk discovery. Lyra would want to fight, but for now she has to trust that people like Saw will bring stability to the galaxy in time for her family to enjoy it. Not to be swallowed whole, bartered and sold by the forces competing to tear it all down.


	12. Captain Nemo's report

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why does this guy have to be called Captain Nemo? I don't know, ask Wookieepedia.

**12) Captain Nemo’s report:** _You can’t see it, it might be behind you / keep those eyes wide_

_You can’t see it, it might be behind you / keep those eyes wide_

Addendum to report CU1967, filed by Cpn. Arhul Nemo. For the eyes of Gen. Davits Draven only.

Further to my report regarding the efficiency and courage of Gerrera’s unit, I must remark upon an unusual member of the unit, and on Gerrera’s own status. Our ally has been in this war longer than most of us, and its effects are showing. He has sustained many injuries that he hides carefully, but he is not the fastest member of his unit, nor the strongest anymore. Mentally, I fear that this physical deterioration is matched by a growing paranoia. He refused to share information that might have reduced the losses suffered by the Commenor Underground, and his tactics displayed a recklessness that makes me reluctant to recommend the use of his unit in future engagements. Yet he inspires incredible devotion amongst his followers, and any efforts to bring them on board without him must almost certainly be doomed to failure.

The most remarkable member of his team is a human girl of twelve who the rebels call his daughter. Gerrera’s interest in her is certainly paternal, and is a strange thing to witness in such a man. In my presence Gerrera only referred to her as ‘child’ or ‘my child’, but my troop claim to have overheard the soldiers call this girl ‘Jyn’. I know of no relationship from which Gerrera could have fathered this girl, so must surmise that she is an adoptee, picked up on one of the many worlds his freedom fighters have liberated.

She is a small, wiry thing with pale skin, dark hair and large green eyes. Her accent indicates a home world in the Core, but given that there are Core refugees all over the galaxy, it does not help to place her. Gerrera’s team treat her as a talisman, or mascot of sorts, and it is not difficult to see why. Although a capable fighter, she bears none of the cynicism of the other militia; she has Gerrera’s fervour, and more than any of them she hangs on his every word and aims to make him proud. Her smile still comes easily to her, and it can light up a room full of tired soldiers, give a struggling commando the hope needed to push their line further, or soothe the nerves of the most burnt-out fighter. I have not seen a being of any species who did not instantly take to her, and as yet, she has no self-consciousness about the way that she evidently inspires those around her.

Nevertheless, even in these difficult times it is a shock to see a child wield a blaster as naturally as ‘Jyn’ does. When I asked her about her life with Gerrera, and whether she was ever sad after a mission, I guessed that she was more aware of her singularity in Gerrera’s unit than it appeared. She is already accomplished at hiding things when questioned by those she doesn’t trust (and as Gerrera trusts no one outside his unit, nor does she), but I saw in her eyes that there are things she does not speak to anyone of. She told me that she would not want any life other than the one she has with Gerrera, and told me that fighting the Empire was the only noble way to live in this galaxy. Gerrera’s doctrine, yes, but when questioned away from the others, she does not repeat it with the fervour she does for the audience of militias.

I am not entirely sure why I know it is important to tell you of this child, but she remains the most incongruous part of this strange battle I have yet encountered. I hope that she survives Gerrera’s missions long enough that, in future, you may hear of her again, and one day get to the bottom of Gerrera’s attachment to one particular orphan in a galaxy growing saturated with them.


	13. Nari McVee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Did you know that one of Jyn's other identities is a cross between the name of her mother's best friend, and her nanny droid?   
> Yeah, well, that sound you just heard? That's my heart breaking.

**13) Nari McVee:** _Don’t be impressed / by strong personalities_

“You’re so _strong_ , Nari.” He plants soft kisses on the back of her neck, at the top of her spine.

The cord that holds her kyber crystal pendant rolls under his lips and she grinds her teeth together, flexing her jaw. Anger rises faster and hotter than the fleeting physical pleasure they’d just shared.

His hands on her bare arms and his mouth still playing around with the cords of her necklace become something she’s enduring, like stun prods stroking her skin.

“You’re amazing,” he breathes, sounding more vacuous than anything else she’s ever heard in the galaxy.

She shrugs her shoulders back, as sharp and hard as she can. It shakes his mouth off her, but not his hands. She closes her eyes and smears her lips together, and she can imagine the look of confusion, the look of hurt on his face at her movement. It makes him ugly, and she represses a shudder.

“Let go, Caro,” she mutters.

“What? I just said you’re amazing,” he’s sounding more like a whiny child with every word.

She stands up abruptly and steps away. The floor is cold permacrete away from the thin mattress. It’s her mattress, and she wants it back.

“Don’t be stupid,” she snarls, half-glancing over her shoulder.

He’s sitting there gawping up at her. She knew this was a bad idea, but sometimes she thinks she misses the simplicity of skin on skin. Why does she always get lonely when it’s with the ones who look at her like she’s the sun, the return of the Force personified, the only thing in the galaxy that matters? Her chest burns with acid reflux.

“But,” he begins.

She bends and throws his clothes at him.

“What do you think this is? Go on. Get out of my room,” she orders. She’s the leader of this little outfit, and she gets her own room. Others leave or enter at her command. No one else has been permitted to enter, and she wishes she’d not made the mistake of being briefly flattered by Caro’s longing glances.

He _did_ have beautiful brown eyes, and he _did_ have beautiful full lips, but not now. Now all she can see is the starry-eyed admiration. He pulls on his pants and shirt slowly, his face approaching something blank, like shell-shock.

She’s still naked, but stands with her back to him. It’s almost a dare, to see if he needs to try and touch her one last time, but he’s smart enough not to. He creeps out, closing the door without a sound.

Nari McVee lets out a shuddering breath and raises a hand to the crystal that’s hot against her throat.

She’s going to have to let him go. When this happens, she can’t fight alongside them anymore. She can’t ask them to risk their lives for her now that she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s _her_ they’d die for, not the mission, not the creds they’ll earn, not even a political cause.

She slumps back down to the mattress and pulls the blanket up over herself. She doesn’t understand how so many people in this galaxy can have their priorities so wrong.


	14. Scarif III

**14) Scarif III:** _Sincere words / are rarely sickly sweet_

It’s a brave person who holds her back from vengeance. But there’s no consciousness of this fact on the face that she turns to accusingly.

“Leave it, leave it,” he breathes, barely audible over the screaming starfighters and blasts in the air around them. His eyes are steady, the only part of him that is, and they throw cold water on the fires of her rage.

His grip on her waist is desperate, though it doesn’t show on his expression. If she takes a step towards Krennic’s stirring body Cassian will fall.

Jyn chooses, and she shrugs her shoulder further under his arm, tightening her lips at his pained hiss of breath. They limp for the turbolift together, and she can’t even feel any annoyance at the way he keeps looking at her.

He wants to say something; from the corner of her eye she sees the crinkle of amusement on his face. His gaze is like a caress, and in the midst of all this death she’s shocked to feel her skin prickle with heat.

He asks her whether she thinks anyone received the plans.

He’d been the one who told her that rebellions are built on hope — how can he not think that someone, somewhere continues their mission now? His eyes linger on her neck, her jawline, her lips. Jyn strains to bring his body closer, her left hand pulling his left arm down over her shoulder, her right hand trying to find purchase somewhere between his belt and his rucking shirt, feeling his skin pimple where her fingers have sought purchase around the material.

She finds that she can’t imagine a galaxy where someone _didn’t_ receive those plans. A day ago, she’d never have dreamed that the Rebel fleet would have scrambled to follow her and a band of hope-starved mutineers into the Empire’s jaws, and yet here they are, and the feeling of others around her, _willing_ this mission to succeed, makes her think that it must. It can only succeed. _You’ll never win_. She remembers now where those words came from.

She tells him with certainty that someone will have picked up the transmission, and she feels him lean closer to her.

They get into the turbolift, and he’s still looking at her. She summons the courage to look back, and for a moment it’s like she’s hanging by one hand in the archive stacks again, vertigo lapping at her senses. It’s been a strange day, where she says nothing and he says “keep going,” and then “leave it,” and they strip off outer layers of clothes together to mourn Kaytoo and to climb, and now they hold each other to stop themselves from falling to the ground together, lives knocked slightly off the normal course of meaning that these words and gestures should hold.

But it’s a few minutes later, when they’re swaying on their knees on the edge of Scarif’s blue waters, and his hand grips hers with determination, that she thinks she finally hears what he’s saying.

“Your father would’ve been proud of you, Jyn.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a few more chapters to come (there'll be 22, but ao3 keeps ignoring the fact I keep entering that), I'll try to get them uploaded tomorrow :) This seemed like a, er, nice place to pause the uploads for tonight anyway.


	15. Jyn and Saw III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About time for a little Saw POV probably.

**15) Jyn and Saw III:** _But if they fool you / which they have been known to_

“Urgh, Jyn, _stop it_ ,” Maia’s eyeroll was audible in her voice as she kicked out under the blanket, trying to hunker down.

“No way, I claimed this spot first,” Jyn replied, lips wrapped around a weary grin. They’d both returned from patrol dusty and aching, and had squeezed their roll mats into the same corner of the hideout, wedged between crates full of weapons and datapads. Jyn extended her short legs as far as she could, playfully shoving Maia’s feet out of her way and receiving a sharp kick in return.

Their muffled snickering was interrupted by a series of heavy footsteps.

“Jyn.” The voice was low and rough, like gravel settling under the landing claws of some mighty ship.

She sat up, glance barely gliding over the glints of Maia’s wide eyes that peered at her from above her blanket. Without a word, she rolled off her mat and slipped her boots back on her sore feet, winding between the crates to find the voice that had called her.

“Saw,” she nodded, straightening her back and composing her features.

He surveyed her, as he surveyed everyone, his eyes moving slightly out of sync with one another as they scrolled over her, assessing every detail about her in one swoop of his heavy lids.

“Come,” he instructed as he turned, having satisfied himself that he knew now precisely how tired she was, how many weapons she had concealed about her person, and how many ideas she had about what this meeting would be about.

Jyn followed obediently, her shoulders square and tiredness swept away from all but the soles of her feet.

Saw led them to his office, a small room with a deceptively large number of hidden exits. His desk was a weapons crate with a datapad and rifle on it, his seat a battered med kit, and a pile of scorched and cracked stormtrooper helmets were the only decoration.

As Jyn perched herself on an upturned helmet, Saw drew a flask and two grimy glasses from behind his desk. He poured them each a shot of moonshine and questioned her about her and Maia’s last shift. Jyn answered simply and accurately, describing the perimeters of the compound via every shadow or sound that had made either her or Maia twitch. There had been no trouble, but Saw would only accept a quiet report if she made it clear how carefully they had nonetheless suspected trouble from each and every noise or movement.

He gave a satisfied grunt and downed the last of his drink. “Thank you, Jyn.”

She glowed with accustomed pride (or was that just the alcohol burning in her chest?).

Saw studied the bottom of his glass as she waited, but he did not find the words he searched for there. Instead he looked back up at her and offered his softest smile. “Goodnight, Jyn, you’re dismissed.”

She nearly hid the look of confusion and exasperation that flashed across her features — the briefing could have waited until morning — but she’d never question him, so she stood and left with a blithe smile for him in return.

She was Saw’s best soldier, and he’d almost told her so. But if he’d done that then she might have suspected that things were coming to a head. He never mentioned her parents either; she knew not to bring them up; but he worried whenever he looked at her and half-saw Lyra, that she had not quite let them go fully, that she remembered them and that her memories could be grasped and used to manipulate her by anyone who had the right information. Saw did not bestow trust lightly, but he had until the next raid on the city to make himself trust that Jyn would be able to take care of herself, and would continue their fight once he had cut her free from the growing suspicions of his team and their contacts.


	16. Looking up (Eadu)

**16) Looking up (Eadu):** _Don’t lose your sight / know something’s not right /_ _and look at the stars_

_-_

_Don’t look up, don’t look up_.

She had told herself this for so long, she had repeated it with such ease to Saw. To Saw’s rasping, unsteady remains.

“You can stand to see the Imperial flag reign across the galaxy?”

“It’s not a problem if you don’t look up.”

She’d kept her eyes down on Wobani; if you made eye contact with the wrong person at an Imperial labour camp you lost your eyes pretty soon thereafter. And she’d kept her eyes down on every mission before that, always ready to leap into a dug-out or slide beneath a blaster bolt. One mission at a time, one city with the same kind of dirty backstreets as the next, barely a glance out of the viewport of whatever ship happened to link one planet to another.

Jyn took a deep, wobbly breath.

Her fingers were shaking and she hated the fact that she couldn’t stop them. She was wedged in the engine compartment of the zeta-class cargo shuttle, free of her soaked outer layers but no drier for it. The unwanted touch of the rain on Eadu returned whenever she moved; it made her shirt clasp her back and her hair cling to her head and neck, and it was suffocating; like being pawed by a needy Gungan.

She’d looked up though, and she’d seen her father; a flickering image just hoping that she was _happy_ ; and then she’d looked up and seen the ground turn to fire under her father’s feet; and she’d looked up and seen the man in white sneering over the debris.

When she tried to look away, back down, all she saw was her father’s face, held beneath the rain of Eadu. His eyes were confused but there was so much love in them, so much more love than Jyn had experienced in the long years they’d been apart.

It was too much, and she had to look away.

An eclipse on Jedha when there never should have been an eclipse; a rebuke like a whiplash to her skin: _suddenly the Rebellion is real for you?_ But it’s been real for so long, _so long_ now, she’d just been tired, she couldn’t look up and face it. And now her face burned in the glare of the realisation that she had to do this, she had to come back to them for Saw, and for her father, and for whatever planets might be next in line for the Empire’s new weapon, and for herself, so she could find out who she might be after all this.

Stiffly, letting the warmth in her chest override the coldness of her damp clothing, she uncoiled herself from the small space and made her way unsteadily out into the hold. Chirrut smiled wanly at her return, and Baze flicked a glance over her that, very subtly, ascertained that she was alright. Cassian’s eyes were closed, the frown line deep between them and every muscle in his body tense in the act of dozing, his knees pulled up to his chest.

The glow of heat in Jyn’s chest grew when she looked at him, and she scowled before heading to the cockpit.

Kay swivelled to regard her before turning back to the controls in silence, but she sidled up next to the pilot’s chair and squeezed Bodhi’s shoulder.

His face was grubby and streaked with rainwater, dust, tears and she’d no idea what else. He looked worried at first, but managed a wobbly smile when he saw her face. “We’re going to make sure we follow this through, right? For Galen, if nothing else, yeah?”

Jyn tried to inject some warmth into her tired smile. She squeezed him again in case that effort failed, and looked up into the tumbling blue field of hyperspace. “Yeah, Bodhi. We will.”


	17. Corulag

**17) Corulag:** _Be wary of being / given a name_

She’d been called a lot of things before, some of which she relished (“Rebel _scum_ ”), some of which made her shudder (“our saviour”, “a hero”). But “terrorist” was a new one to her; especially when it came from the mouths of crowds lining the street.

Liana Hallik rather liked the way it sounded, here on Corulag at least.

She could see that a lot of people’s hearts weren’t in the chant. Downcast, blank expressions framed obediently moving lips, and the sound swelled like a wave only when she passed pockets of Imperial recruits.

For them, she squared her shoulders and rolled her chin back, gazing at their clean, young faces through narrowed eyes, wearing a vibroblade-thin smile.

She regretted the fact that she hadn’t quite succeeded in destroying the dictator’s yacht. The guns would have been replaced by him soon enough, but the ship would have been a real blow to his ego. And hitting a dictator squarely in the ego was the sweetest thing that Liana could imagine.

The mere intention to do so was what had led to this spectacle. Corulag’s ruler wanted Liana to know how hated she was here in his own private toytown; but Liana could see from the miserable locals and the rows of white-armoured troopers that it had been better to try and fail than not to try at all.

So she preened and strutted, even when the odd rock or handful of rubbish was cast in her direction. If the dictator wanted to break her then he’d have to try harder than this.

Liana’s laugh was hoarse over her broken lips when, hours later, she told the stormtroopers that they still weren’t trying hard enough. Kneeling in the dark cell, her back arched under another blow from their stun prods. Her legs and arms and back burned in so many places that she could no longer distinguish one strike from the next, and her mouth was dry with the taste of dust and iron. But the pain didn’t faze her, not when she could see the frustration in the way the troopers held their armoured shoulders; not when she heard a sigh of exasperation escape from one helmet; especially not when the one wielding the prod gave their shoulder a roll to stretch out tired muscles.

Each strike now was a sizzling reminder of life: she’d been imprisoned before, and she’d be imprisoned again, but they wouldn’t keep her here on Corulag for any length of time; they never did. Liana knew how to talk around guards and bored officers, and she knew that if any of her team had escaped they’d be preparing a distraction for just the moment when her prison transfer was occurring.

The harder their blows, the warmer her skin glowed, and the kyber crystal hidden beneath her clothes sang in tune with her body, its own soft heat like a reassuring touch at her throat. She’d never have admitted it, not to a single living soul in the universe, but she’d close her eyes and arc her neck up and think of a dark-haired woman doing something very brave and very stupid a lifetime ago, and she’d feel like she’d never be alone in what was being inflicted on her, and that the dictator had therefore no hope of overcoming her.

Liana regretted even more bitterly not destroying his ship when it became clear that his ego had already taken more than it could bear. She was being transferred alright, but off-planet, with more of a guard than her team would be able to handle. The kind of guard you only got when the Empire had a single-minded desire to sentence you to death; in the midst of an escape attempt, or a few months or years down the line at your destination.

Wobani was viciously cold, and Liana’s confidence faltered as she was marched from the transport to the barracks. She struggled to concentrate on the warmth of the kyber at her neck, but panic and dismay were rising together, and she could only see dead ends in every direction.


	18. Yavin 4

**18) Yavin 4:** _if for some reason / you’re not considered the same_

_Once they name you_

In the command centre, she felt like she was caught in the crossfire of warring gangs. The reasons to fight were obvious to her: it was just what you did when backed into a corner. And no corner had yet looked as unappealing as one with the Death Star’s weapon focussed on it. So why did so many people think that they could appease the Empire at this late stage? What negotiations did any of them hope to make when it was painfully, blindingly clear that capitulation would come from fear? The fear that the Empire had always relied on…

Bodhi was shaking his head at her across the room, his arms folded tight about him and his eyes a shock of white in the gloom where he stood. At least he was as disappointed as she was.

Jyn stormed from the room, head spinning with something like betrayal — they’d busted her out of prison, after all — what had they wanted her to do with the information gained from Saw and her father? Her lips curled into a snarl as she reminded herself that information hadn’t been what they’d wanted; a straight execution had been the extent of the Rebellion’s ambitions.

The light of Yavin’s fourth moon was warm, but the jungle air was not as stifling as the atmosphere in that room had been. Jyn emerged into it not far from Chirrut and Baze’s waiting forms. She could sense a wave of _something_ — amusement? Pride? — roll off Chirrut by the way he shifted position and regarded her with those smiling blue irises of his. She should have been unnerved by the way he tracked her, but from him, it felt like the most natural and reassuring thing.

When she announced the council’s indecision, Baze’s intense glare fixed her and Chirrut’s smile broadened. “She wants to _fight_ ,” he beamed, knocking his staff on the compact earth like a fan cheering his favourite act on music night in a cantina.

Bodhi’s relieved exhalation made her spin, but Baze’s sudden, dazzling grin drew her back to him. Chirrut admired the scene, however it was he perceived it, as it dawned on Jyn that she’d somehow become the leader of a unit again. The first one in months, since the petty little scheme that had landed her on Wobani had gone south. It hadn’t seemed petty at the time, but the occupied peoples of Corulag did not know misery like those left behind on Jedha did, and she now fervently hoped they never would.

She was still trying to work out what to do with the three followers she’d suddenly acquired when the sense of being outflanked crept up her shoulders. Encouraged by Baze’s knowing smirk and Bodhi’s awed gape, she turned to face the hangar and saw Cassian leading a dozen or so Rebels towards them.

It appeared that she was going to be leading a bigger unit than ever before. On the biggest mission that she’d ever undertaken.

She wasn’t sure how to square the words “welcome home” with the way the soldiers only semi-joshingly referred to her as Sergeant Erso, but it was something she found herself happy to grow used to.


	19. After Wobani

**19) After Wobani:** _they have been known to / lock you in_

Catching a glimpse of her reflection in a stormtrooper’s visor now and then was one thing, but she’d not had a chance to fully study the changes written on her face until she snatched a moment of peace in the ‘fresher on the Rebel base. Jyn grimaced at herself, wondering if her eyes had always had the washed-out, haunted look they now carried. Her skin had been tanned irregularly by the wind and the weak sun that reflected off Wobani’s tundra; it had left dusty, dirty creases at the corners of her eyes, the dimples by her mouth, and in lines across her neck.

She pursed her lips and made herself look down at her hands, gripping the edge of the sink. She raised a set of fingers to her neck, stroking down against the grain of the lines there, realising that they came from the way she’d held her head bent over on Wobani: always looking at her feet, the ground, trying not to let the guards see the sneer on her face if she had to acknowledge them.

Her fingers pressed into her skin, tracking down her throat until they fell below the neckline of her shirt and found the pendant there. She drew a deep breath, finding stillness and calm in the touch of the kyber crystal. She was at last able to reorder her shoulders, pushing them away from her jawline, stretching out the muscles in her back to arch her shoulder-blades together. She met her own eyes again; found that she looked less like she was still contained in invisible shackles; found that she could soften the tension around her eyes.

Jyn cupped her fingers under the cold trickle of water from the drinking station and rubbed her fingerprints deep into the skin around her eye sockets, mouth and chin. She pressed at her own skin until the icy water burned, trying to erase the tracks of the past months.

_Saw Gerrera is alive. My father is alive_.

The mere thought made her muscles tighten again; she flicked the remaining water from her hands and tried to stare herself down. Her face glistened in the patches she’d washed, the skin red from the pressure she’d applied here and there. The wildness in her wide, blank gaze wasn’t leaving any time soon, no matter how long or how often she held onto that damn crystal.

They probably wouldn’t even recognise her; she told herself she wasn’t certain she’d know her father in a crowd after so long.

But a small part of her asked — how could I _not_ know him?

She couldn’t bring his face to mind, only a vague memory of the timbre of his voice as he said her name, offering something reassuring back on Lah’mu that he’d had no hope of delivering.

Her hands were shaking, and she looked at them as her betrayers, balled them into fists and shoved them into the pockets of her sleeveless jacket. Anger rose at the thought of Saw and of her father: Saw, who’d abandoned a child, someone who’d been _his_ child, to an unforgiving, aimless galaxy of troubles; Galen, who was the reason she’d never had peace, the reason she’d locked her real name away for so long, the reason she could never stop running.

Jyn turned from the mirror and let her shoulders hike up furiously again, let her gaze drop back to the floor as her mind toyed with the revived memories and the rage that came with them. She’d been broken out of Wobani and Liana Hallik’s dead end reality only to be dumped right back into Jyn Erso’s optionless world, where everything was defined by her relationship to a father she barely knew. As she returned to the hangar, she wondered whether this strange mission might finally be the one to put an end to her flight from her family name, and she tried to be reassured by the possibility.


	20. Saw and Jyn

**20) Saw and Jyn:** _Statistical sin / they’d rather ignore_

“Th…those…that was a lot of dead civilians,” Jyn managed quietly, half turning to Saw’s lieutenant but not looking to meet his eyes.

He shrugged, but Saw stopped his pacing in front of them and regarded Jyn from his better eye. His expression wasn’t quite sour; he looked more like he’d been interrupted in some important thought. Jyn’s muscles twitched and she regretted saying anything.

“There are no ‘civilians’ on this planet, Jyn.”

She swallowed and nodded, hefted her blaster up to her shoulder as she tried to look confident in her agreement.

“If they’re not Imperial, and they’re not with us,” Saw continued, walking steadily towards her now. “Then they must be…?”

Jyn twitched her chin up, lowering her eyelids and composing herself. “Collaborators, sir.”

Saw continued his approach, stopping just before her to look down for a long period of silence.

This was a recent proclamation, and Jyn was finding it harder to take to heart than all the talk that she’d been raised with: of overthrowing oppression and encouraging people through brave deeds.

“Quite so,” he eventually rumbled. “Dismissed, Jyn,” Saw turned away from her and Jyn gratefully retreated.

“Well, I knew she wasn’t your biological daughter, but that girl is _soft_ ,” the lieutenant smirked as she left earshot.

Saw shot him a glare, stepping abruptly up to him. The man’s smirk only faltered briefly before it redoubled. “Yeah, she must have been with you since she was, what? Eight? Ten? You kept the worst of it from her?”

The man was a recent recruit, but Saw was still surprised by how freely he spoke to him. He wasn’t afraid, or annoyed, but felt a growing curiosity at this man’s confident tone. They’d picked him up in the Corporate Sector; he’d claimed to have worked for the Rebellion, but had missed his extraction and been cut loose. He’d heard of Saw through Rebel Intelligence and had leapt at the chance to join his team.

“I did,” Saw said quietly. “Jyn is stronger than most, and she’s been with me longer than nearly all my other crew. You’d do well to keep that in mind.”

The man gave a far-too-relaxed shrug. “Sure, no problem. The name though, what is that? It’s not a Core name, right? Or did you give her it?”

Saw’s mouth curved down in an exaggerated line, but his forehead did not wrinkle. “Lieutenant. You claimed that my reputation far preceded me when we met on Duroon. Might I suggest that you think back to what you claimed to know back then, consider that it would not be difficult to leave you somewhere with even less chance of extraction than that swamp, and remember that I have never left a live crew member behind before.”

Finally, some of the man’s smugness faltered. Saw suspected that the Rebellion hadn’t deemed this spy’s skills worth the cost of an extraction from uninhabited, remote Duroon. But if he’d ever learnt of the Rebellion’s latent curiosity about the fate of an Imperial scientist and his daughter… if the Rebellion felt it was in their interest to force the Empire’s hand… Saw scanned the man again with a grunt of derision. He’d have to keep a close watch on the situation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was regretting setting myself this challenge a bit by this point - the links to the lyrics in the second half of these are either glaringly simplistic or really tenuous. So apologies; I'd committed and wanted to finish... congrats if you've read this far! And really, thank you, I know this is pretty self-indulgent. But it made me write.


	21. Galen Erso (Jedha)

**21) Galen Erso (Jedha):** _Who’ll weep for them? Sometimes I do._

_I do sometimes_

_Who weeps for them? Sometimes I do._

_I do sometimes_

She could feel Saw’s disappointment heavy in his gaze. But what was he to her now? Still just the man who’d abandoned her; just the man who’d raised her and honed her and sharpened her and made her whatever she was now. She had nothing to spare him now, not when confronted with the thin blue image wavering before her.

She tried to keep her threat closed against the onrush of _things_ wanting to pour out of her. But the will to live, to breathe, to go on gasping the dusty, stale air of this awful place (at once somewhere she’d lived for eight years of her life and somewhere she’d never been before today) made it hard, meant she had to fight with herself. Heavy exhalations forced themselves from her nostrils, but her mouth was clamped together.

She pressed her lips tighter when she realised she could still taste the salt of her tears welling in the folds of her trembling mouth, but felt, deep down, that it was already too late if she was crying. She was on her knees, the thin material of her trousers letting the sharp rocks of the catacomb floor jab her skin. Her arms and hands were limp before her as she swayed slightly, listening to an image of the man who was still, after all her efforts to escape it, her father. Her father saying that he hoped that wherever she was she was _happy_.

She shook her head and felt water overflow her brimming eyelids. She was paralysed by longing; the aching wish for the hologram to reach out; to stroke the tears from her cheeks; whisper “my Stardust” and pick her up with ease; to tuck her below her warm blankets in her room back on Lah’mu, or Coruscant, or wherever home was; and to place her toy in her arm and wish her goodnight with love and switch the light off and let her sleep.

Jyn was so tired, she wanted that reality so badly, but the rocks stabbing into her joints wouldn’t let her leave this one, and her father’s subdued, rapid tones revealed details about a weapon, and about plans, and a weakness, and the archives on Scarif, and she had to remember it all. She couldn’t be with him at home because first she had to do this thing for him. The only thing he asked of her, other than that she was happy. At least she could fulfil one of his desires.

The holo had already been poor quality when Saw had inserted it, and her tears made it blurrier and more uneven, but now it flickered like a panic attack and a rumble shook the dark room.

Jyn did not care. The image was seared onto her mind; even when it disappeared fully she held onto the memory of it, stayed fixed in the self-same spot. She wanted to wash away all she’d done and been over the last sixteen years of her life, to go back, become what her father had wanted, to take away all the consequences of being the daughter of Galen Erso and to replace them with something simpler and quieter.

But she’d get no peace: the ground was becoming unstable, Saw was shouting, someone else was shouting, there was a sharp grip under her arms, fingers digging into her as hard as the rocks below her pressed her to _get up_. Her head lolled forward, maybe an instinct to hide the tears, but she let herself be hauled to her feet, and let herself stumble against this insistent force, sparing only the briefest of confused glances back to Saw’s form. He was shouting something. It sounded like an order. Jyn nodded dumbly; Saw knew she’d always follow his orders.


	22. Galen Erso (Eadu)

**22) Galen Erso (Eadu)** _You can’t see it, it might be behind you / keep your eyes wide_

_You can’t see it, it might be behind you / keep those eyes wide_

_Keep your eyes on the back of your mind_

“And … the girl?”

Krennic never had bothered to learn his daughter’s name. Nor had so many of his colleagues; researchers who made the barest concessions to polite conversation, but really relied on Galen to provide them with an opportunity to discuss the more important things in the universe: energy fields and synthetic crystals and where one could locate the boundaries between life and death in the superstructure of stones. It made Lyra bristle. He could feel her shift and sigh at his side, torn between defending their family and her lifestyle, and anger that she should feel obliged to defend it.

Krennic hadn’t even bothered to check his daughter’s name when he’d come for them, had he?

Galen’s mind swum; why was he thinking about that now? Krennic must have intercepted the message he’d sent with that brave young pilot — what was his name? It was no good Galen feeling resentful of people for forgetting his daughter’s name if he couldn’t remember who had agreed to give hope to his ailing conscience — Rook, Bodhi Rook, the pilot. Galen wondered why his heart didn’t sink as much as it should have, if he suspected that Rook had been intercepted, that his message had been discovered.

His vision was blurry, but the sky seemed to spark and glitter with colourful lights, like it had on the day they’d fled Coruscant. The roaring in his ears seemed to hide a single word, somewhere at the edge of his thoughts, that now tugged insistently on his consciousness. What could make him feel hopeful like this? Now, as he found his memories tumbling together, holding Lyra’s body in the wet grass of Lah’mu, feeling his skin numb through thin trousers the longer he refused to move, thinking that perhaps he _couldn’t_ move, that he lay in the dewy undergrowth, or that he was pinned down by something hot, or wet, or very cold, on a planet that was far from the one his thoughts kept returning to.

A face blocked out his view of the glittering sky: long hair dark with rainwater, the silhouette distorted by a wholly inadequate hat.

Galen squinted; the face was framed by two lights, angled so that they lit up cheekbones, reflecting the wet skin of a wide-eyed woman looking down at him.

She looked so familiar, but Lyra had died on Lah’mu, hadn’t she? Or had Galen died, and she was now looking down on him with the panic, the clinging _NO_ that he thought he’d looked at her with?

_Papa_.

That was it, that was the word that kept pulling him back to this dark planet, wouldn’t quite let him accept that he and Bodhi Rook had failed.

She was here, so she must have got his message. She was here, so she must have survived. She was alive and she was here. Galen tried to swallow, tried to find words in a throat that felt parched even as all around him seemed to be dissolving in the heavy rain.

He recognised the stubborn edge to her jaw and lips, the brows that had shot such furious frowns at Krennic and other employers of his — but her eyes were her mother’s eyes on Lah’mu. He saw them transform as she looked at him, her mouth working and her hands at his face and collar, tugging, touching, insisting that he stay with her. Something soft in them was leaving: they were becoming the eyes of a cornered animal, someone who had convinced themselves they had nothing left to lose.

Galen wanted to reassure her; he wanted her to know that he’d never stopped thinking of her. He had hoped that the way people had ignored a child at research gatherings, the way Krennic had treated her as an inconvenience, would mean she was allowed to slip away quietly. To escape from his name and his memory, to find a spot of her own in the galaxy where no one would have looked twice at her or thought of dragging her back into the web of ulterior motives that had enmeshed Galen’s life since Vallt. Since she was born.

But as she remonstrated with him and demanded that he stay, he almost felt that he could. She would not be denied, and he could feel her bring the full force of her personality to bear on him, a personality that he at once knew intimately and yet would never know, as his hold on life grew tenuous. The galaxy didn’t let people like that just slip away quietly from themselves.

Finding strength in her determined features, in the hard grip of her fingers on his uniform, Galen managed to raise an arm that he couldn’t quite feel. His fingers found her face and brushed at the water running over her cool skin. She leaned a little into the touch, shaking her head like he’d shaken his head at Lyra. They were a stubborn family.

He managed a smile. “Jyn.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, all of this revolves around Jyn's father, and that's fine, and that's how the plot of R1 works, and I love Jyn and I love R1 anyway. Though I kind of wish, even if just for an easy Bechdel pass, they'd made Lyra the scientist instead of Galen. Oh well. Next task: fix-it fic where Jyn gets to be something more than just Galen's daughter.


End file.
